I believe this and based on anecdotal evidence this seems to be an inherent difference between males and females. I’ll theorize that it’s because, from an evolutionary biology perspective, women are much more dependent on the community to keep themselves and their children safe so it’s more important for them to closely align with others in the community.
That said, I don’t know how to apologize on behalf of my sex. This is so wrong. The answer to speech we disagree with isn’t banning the speech, it’s more speech making the argument for why the initial speech was wrong. Debate is how we arrive at the best ideas; we don’t just accept the first thing someone says.
In my eyes, there's no need to apologize on behalf of anyone else. You're you! You aren't and cannot be responsible for other women's actions, only your own. Thus, you have nothing to apologize for.
agreed, she shouldn't applogize! it's interesting i have never seen women respond this graciously to men professing guilt on behalf of their gender. only some variation of "yeahhh, not looking great. you gotta do better and police other men." differences indeed.
These remarks are always revealing. I have explained to women that they are essentially asking for fascism. They get very angry, but the more intelligent ones learn.
You’re all right that it doesn’t make sense for a person to apologize for other people they share nothing with other than demographics. I just found myself so disappointed in other women!
Although there may be some inherent differences and women may be wired to value group alignment more than men, it’s still definitely possible for women who are educated in the right environment to value free speech and debate. I am a very conflict-adverse person by nature, but I still truly don’t understand how anyone can think it’s a good idea to disallow speech you disagree with. This goes against every principle of a free society!
When some man says “I apologise on behalf on my gender (or race, or …)” my response is not “how noble”. It’s “I didn’t ask you to speak in my behalf, you snivelling git”. This is true even if I think they have a point. Apologise on your own behalf. Act to make changes. But don’t appoint yourself spokesman for others - even if you agree that your demographic tends towards certain behaviours
This line of thought leads to the evil of collective guilt. By analogy: Collective caution is fine; young people as a whole pay higher car insurance premiums because as a whole they are riskier drivers. But if one young person causes an accident then they alone should be held accountable - it’s neither just or constructive to demand an accounting or contrition from those who were uninvolved.
I may have chosen my words poorly. You may also be reading way too much into it.
I strongly agree with you that we are all individuals, not representatives of demographic groups, and that thinking all members of demographic groups are interchangeable is part of what’s gotten us in the mess we’re in.
I certainly don’t believe I speak for all women on the planet, and it was admittedly an attempt to distance myself from a behavior I find abhorrent but that some people would assume I am somehow inherently inclined to engage in based on the statistics being presented. I think it’s natural to feel a little dismayed when confronted with credible evidence that a demographic you’re part of engages in a harmful behavior at higher rates. Especially when it’s a demographic like sex that DOES drive some inherent behavioral differences.
All that said, I think your reaction was a bit much, but you’re entitled to believe I’m a sniveling git if you like.
My first paragraph was specifically about men, and how many men feel when someone else presumes to represent them.
Does it also apply to women? I don’t know. I hear your words as coming from a place of sympathy - “these men have been hurt by poor behaviour of some women & I feel for them.” But most men don’t want you to lower yourself by trying to carry someone else’s guilt
The prime example of the difference is that you'd feel the need to offer some sort of apology for being female. Acting as such is definitely not a male trait.
You are probably right that more women than men would feel this way. But certainly there are many examples of men attempting to distance themselves from the behavior of other men and paint themselves as “one of the good guys”. It is human nature to try to avoid criticism.
I suspect you're right, but you can't tell from a single survey in a single time and place nurture versus nature. You might start to get at that if you repeated the survey and saw the same pattern in China, Brazil, and the Congo.
And I wouldn't get too guilty. You can't blame a random guy on the street for things other men have done...but you might tell your daughter if a guy invites her over 'to play video games', he might have something else than that in mind.
You shouldn't be responsible for apologizing for people aside from yourself. I'm not sure apologies are required anyway for an inherent fact of biology. Women have been in the forefront of religion for a very long time, even back as far as early Christian practice, and maybe before that, we don't have a lot of evidence. How women would be treated in the Church was the subject of a lot of strife in the pre-Constantine church, since women were so prominent. Dogma and belief are at cross purposes to free expression. Your theorizing is probably pretty close to the mark.
Tolerance of other views (hearing them without screaming or trying to get the speaker fired, etc.) correlates strongly with the level of confidence the listener has in his own views, I think. Anyone who is secure in his own beliefs and actions has no need to fear contrary perspectives, and is content to answer them with reason, not force.
I think you're right to an extent, but I also think it has to do with curiosity and open-mindedness. As a woman and someone who is not entirely confident in my views about any one issue (I am confident in my principles, though), I would never shout down or try to cancel a speaker because I know that by allowing them, as well as their opponents, to speak, my views will be informed and perhaps more solidified as a result.
Hi Chapin! Fascinating stuff but could you point me to where the raw data are? I couldn't find them at the link you gave, and the heat maps are frankly giving me a headache :)
The tolerance values are calculated as even sums of the left/right speaker questions and scaled 0-100%. Let me know if you have other questions about the data/my analysis.
Tolerance is measured by asking whether students would allow hypothetical controversial speakers to speak on campus. It's explained in the longer article, and the statements are listed in the addendum:
I think women tend to value feelings/emotions more. They don't wanna see people get their feelings hurt. And some opinions hurt people's feelings, sooo...
We have rules in place to deal with male rage and violence. We do not have any structures or policies in place to deal with female shaming and reputation destruction. Besides, male violence peaks in their teens and is no longer needed once they are out in a world where one's status is defined.
Men are no more violent today than they were in the past. Our rules can handles that, at least when we want them to. Of course, now many cities have decided to stop punishing violent men. Want to guess which sex was pushing for that change?
I do not understand your comment. Are you saying we should stop enforcing crime? Should we legalize rape and domestic violence? I cannot understand where your comment came from, unless it is a bot.
Thankfully we have organizations like Braver Angels and BridgeUSA that are working to cultivate tolerance and respectful disagreement. I just wrote Substack articles about both of their efforts; I hope they become more mainstream.
If the difference is simply that women prefer more social harmony, wouldn’t we expect to see this effect across generations? Has anyone done that study? I’d bet Gen X and Boomers have less of this effect and if we could find enough of the Greatest Generation still, we wouldn’t see this gap at all, or it might not even reach the level of significance. There are other things going on with millennial and Gen Z women: they have been educated by teachers and professors to despise debate and have been overwhelmingly captured by those views, while those views have actually driven men away, in large part because the package of views includes the concept of “toxic masculinity”. Another potential contributor to the effect could be that young women are far more engaged on social media than young men are. Young men are more engaged with online video games. Social media literally trains your brain to react in strongly antisocial ways to things you disagree with, due to the internal reward system of clicks, likes, and shares.
Women did not dominate certain fields in the past. We are in a brave new world now where industries such as book publishing, journalism, university administration and others are now dominated by women for the first time in human history. It is in these fields where we see the decline in tolerance.
Interesting evidence to a fairly common anecdotal claim.
I've theorized for some time now that this is potentially linked to direct experience of the consequences of physical violence in interpersonal disputes.
Little boys grow up with much more experience in this area than little girls. Hence, they think differently about the consequences of escalating conflict. Women, being more inclined to covert or indirect forms of violence, rarely feel the sting of retributive conflict escalation. Engaged by proxy, it will be men who bare the burden of this socially.
Most of the American cancel culture participants are nothing more than the modern equivalent of spinster church ladies. They love to point out the flaws of others and point out their own virtue. In the absence of public morality they now use more fashionable metrics such as bigotry. This is most obvious in the "me-too" accusations where they struggle so hard because consent is the only concept left to exploit.
Now that people stopped attending church, the busy bodies moved on to becoming university administrators and high school teachers. They LOVE judging others. They ruin every industry they come to dominate, then blame everyone else for running away. Even the women who hate this have trouble recognizing it for what it is. instead they say "I hate working for women" when in reality they hate being around close-minded hypocrites who happen to be female.
The only way to fix this is to legislate it, and to promote rules-based environments while dismissing and demonizing taboo-based environments. The reason so many places are so oppressive is because these busy-bodies love to enforce taboos, and they hate rules because they are explicit and cannot be warped in order to attacks others.
Tolerance is essential in a multicultural society. We are careening towards civil war. We must fix broken environments before the rot spreads to important institutions.
I used to follow a science blog which suggested moms try to influence other moms to vaccinate their kids/be skeptical of anti-vaccine propaganda through playground conversations. That was before I became a mom. No, I didn't become anti-vaccine. But I did notice that in practice, playground conversations between moms often stay at the surface level and don't touch on anything that could be considered controversial. A lot of women here have pointed out (and I agree) that there's a survival aspect here. New mom needs a village, so she needs to avoid saying anything that could be off-putting to her potential community. But I find myself wishing I could speak more freely with other moms and share more of myself. Even when I do, I find myself mostly sharing opinions I feel they will agree with. Does anyone have any ideas for how to promote freer speech norms among mom friends?
The fact that only one of the issues directly affected women doesn't exactly jam up that argument. It would also make sense if, being historically more constrained by the consequences of political decisions, women are generally more reactive on the behalf of whatever group is most affected while men get to remain aloof and treat political discourse as a kind of game. I suspect this is at least part of a larger explanation.
This is because men are more likely to physically attack and beat up their opponents, so they know they always have the option of violence if they don’t like what they hear.
Male negative actions have been carefully regulated over time. We have rules to deal with male anger and severe consequences for violence. This is an issue that was solved generations ago. The only places it has returned are those where "activists" have successfully pushed to keep more violent men out of jail and on the street. Very few of those activists are male.
I believe this and based on anecdotal evidence this seems to be an inherent difference between males and females. I’ll theorize that it’s because, from an evolutionary biology perspective, women are much more dependent on the community to keep themselves and their children safe so it’s more important for them to closely align with others in the community.
That said, I don’t know how to apologize on behalf of my sex. This is so wrong. The answer to speech we disagree with isn’t banning the speech, it’s more speech making the argument for why the initial speech was wrong. Debate is how we arrive at the best ideas; we don’t just accept the first thing someone says.
In my eyes, there's no need to apologize on behalf of anyone else. You're you! You aren't and cannot be responsible for other women's actions, only your own. Thus, you have nothing to apologize for.
agreed, she shouldn't applogize! it's interesting i have never seen women respond this graciously to men professing guilt on behalf of their gender. only some variation of "yeahhh, not looking great. you gotta do better and police other men." differences indeed.
These remarks are always revealing. I have explained to women that they are essentially asking for fascism. They get very angry, but the more intelligent ones learn.
You’re all right that it doesn’t make sense for a person to apologize for other people they share nothing with other than demographics. I just found myself so disappointed in other women!
Although there may be some inherent differences and women may be wired to value group alignment more than men, it’s still definitely possible for women who are educated in the right environment to value free speech and debate. I am a very conflict-adverse person by nature, but I still truly don’t understand how anyone can think it’s a good idea to disallow speech you disagree with. This goes against every principle of a free society!
Appreciate your willingness to discourse on this
When some man says “I apologise on behalf on my gender (or race, or …)” my response is not “how noble”. It’s “I didn’t ask you to speak in my behalf, you snivelling git”. This is true even if I think they have a point. Apologise on your own behalf. Act to make changes. But don’t appoint yourself spokesman for others - even if you agree that your demographic tends towards certain behaviours
This line of thought leads to the evil of collective guilt. By analogy: Collective caution is fine; young people as a whole pay higher car insurance premiums because as a whole they are riskier drivers. But if one young person causes an accident then they alone should be held accountable - it’s neither just or constructive to demand an accounting or contrition from those who were uninvolved.
I may have chosen my words poorly. You may also be reading way too much into it.
I strongly agree with you that we are all individuals, not representatives of demographic groups, and that thinking all members of demographic groups are interchangeable is part of what’s gotten us in the mess we’re in.
I certainly don’t believe I speak for all women on the planet, and it was admittedly an attempt to distance myself from a behavior I find abhorrent but that some people would assume I am somehow inherently inclined to engage in based on the statistics being presented. I think it’s natural to feel a little dismayed when confronted with credible evidence that a demographic you’re part of engages in a harmful behavior at higher rates. Especially when it’s a demographic like sex that DOES drive some inherent behavioral differences.
All that said, I think your reaction was a bit much, but you’re entitled to believe I’m a sniveling git if you like.
Hey Dee. Thanks for responding.
My first paragraph was specifically about men, and how many men feel when someone else presumes to represent them.
Does it also apply to women? I don’t know. I hear your words as coming from a place of sympathy - “these men have been hurt by poor behaviour of some women & I feel for them.” But most men don’t want you to lower yourself by trying to carry someone else’s guilt
The prime example of the difference is that you'd feel the need to offer some sort of apology for being female. Acting as such is definitely not a male trait.
Biology wins again.
You are probably right that more women than men would feel this way. But certainly there are many examples of men attempting to distance themselves from the behavior of other men and paint themselves as “one of the good guys”. It is human nature to try to avoid criticism.
I mean, we don't know that from this data.
I suspect you're right, but you can't tell from a single survey in a single time and place nurture versus nature. You might start to get at that if you repeated the survey and saw the same pattern in China, Brazil, and the Congo.
And I wouldn't get too guilty. You can't blame a random guy on the street for things other men have done...but you might tell your daughter if a guy invites her over 'to play video games', he might have something else than that in mind.
True. And I don’t feel guilty, just dismayed.
You shouldn't be responsible for apologizing for people aside from yourself. I'm not sure apologies are required anyway for an inherent fact of biology. Women have been in the forefront of religion for a very long time, even back as far as early Christian practice, and maybe before that, we don't have a lot of evidence. How women would be treated in the Church was the subject of a lot of strife in the pre-Constantine church, since women were so prominent. Dogma and belief are at cross purposes to free expression. Your theorizing is probably pretty close to the mark.
Tolerance of other views (hearing them without screaming or trying to get the speaker fired, etc.) correlates strongly with the level of confidence the listener has in his own views, I think. Anyone who is secure in his own beliefs and actions has no need to fear contrary perspectives, and is content to answer them with reason, not force.
I think you're right to an extent, but I also think it has to do with curiosity and open-mindedness. As a woman and someone who is not entirely confident in my views about any one issue (I am confident in my principles, though), I would never shout down or try to cancel a speaker because I know that by allowing them, as well as their opponents, to speak, my views will be informed and perhaps more solidified as a result.
If you don’t trust in the reason of your fellow citizens you don’t trust them coming up with the right answers
Hi Chapin! Fascinating stuff but could you point me to where the raw data are? I couldn't find them at the link you gave, and the heat maps are frankly giving me a headache :)
The raw data is here: https://rankings.thefire.org/methodology
The tolerance values are calculated as even sums of the left/right speaker questions and scaled 0-100%. Let me know if you have other questions about the data/my analysis.
I can't find these charts or their data in the reports. Could you please pinpoint them? I want to know what is meant by "tolerance" in this context.
Tolerance is measured by asking whether students would allow hypothetical controversial speakers to speak on campus. It's explained in the longer article, and the statements are listed in the addendum:
https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/men-are-more-tolerant-of-the-other
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QG2qjqd-gKj9SFIkAeS4wtZ2q_jQwUVCjz9d-k-dPZk/edit?tab=t.0
I think women tend to value feelings/emotions more. They don't wanna see people get their feelings hurt. And some opinions hurt people's feelings, sooo...
Men will just get violent to shut them down.
We have rules in place to deal with male rage and violence. We do not have any structures or policies in place to deal with female shaming and reputation destruction. Besides, male violence peaks in their teens and is no longer needed once they are out in a world where one's status is defined.
Men are no more violent today than they were in the past. Our rules can handles that, at least when we want them to. Of course, now many cities have decided to stop punishing violent men. Want to guess which sex was pushing for that change?
Yeah, you guys are doing a great job
I do not understand your comment. Are you saying we should stop enforcing crime? Should we legalize rape and domestic violence? I cannot understand where your comment came from, unless it is a bot.
Male reading comprehension skills ftw
Guess who's more likely to want harsher punishments for violence. Men, or women?
Thankfully we have organizations like Braver Angels and BridgeUSA that are working to cultivate tolerance and respectful disagreement. I just wrote Substack articles about both of their efforts; I hope they become more mainstream.
https://spiritandsword.substack.com/p/is-the-bridging-movement-the-counterculture
If the difference is simply that women prefer more social harmony, wouldn’t we expect to see this effect across generations? Has anyone done that study? I’d bet Gen X and Boomers have less of this effect and if we could find enough of the Greatest Generation still, we wouldn’t see this gap at all, or it might not even reach the level of significance. There are other things going on with millennial and Gen Z women: they have been educated by teachers and professors to despise debate and have been overwhelmingly captured by those views, while those views have actually driven men away, in large part because the package of views includes the concept of “toxic masculinity”. Another potential contributor to the effect could be that young women are far more engaged on social media than young men are. Young men are more engaged with online video games. Social media literally trains your brain to react in strongly antisocial ways to things you disagree with, due to the internal reward system of clicks, likes, and shares.
Women did not dominate certain fields in the past. We are in a brave new world now where industries such as book publishing, journalism, university administration and others are now dominated by women for the first time in human history. It is in these fields where we see the decline in tolerance.
Interesting evidence to a fairly common anecdotal claim.
I've theorized for some time now that this is potentially linked to direct experience of the consequences of physical violence in interpersonal disputes.
Little boys grow up with much more experience in this area than little girls. Hence, they think differently about the consequences of escalating conflict. Women, being more inclined to covert or indirect forms of violence, rarely feel the sting of retributive conflict escalation. Engaged by proxy, it will be men who bare the burden of this socially.
Most of the American cancel culture participants are nothing more than the modern equivalent of spinster church ladies. They love to point out the flaws of others and point out their own virtue. In the absence of public morality they now use more fashionable metrics such as bigotry. This is most obvious in the "me-too" accusations where they struggle so hard because consent is the only concept left to exploit.
Now that people stopped attending church, the busy bodies moved on to becoming university administrators and high school teachers. They LOVE judging others. They ruin every industry they come to dominate, then blame everyone else for running away. Even the women who hate this have trouble recognizing it for what it is. instead they say "I hate working for women" when in reality they hate being around close-minded hypocrites who happen to be female.
The only way to fix this is to legislate it, and to promote rules-based environments while dismissing and demonizing taboo-based environments. The reason so many places are so oppressive is because these busy-bodies love to enforce taboos, and they hate rules because they are explicit and cannot be warped in order to attacks others.
Tolerance is essential in a multicultural society. We are careening towards civil war. We must fix broken environments before the rot spreads to important institutions.
Banned.
I used to follow a science blog which suggested moms try to influence other moms to vaccinate their kids/be skeptical of anti-vaccine propaganda through playground conversations. That was before I became a mom. No, I didn't become anti-vaccine. But I did notice that in practice, playground conversations between moms often stay at the surface level and don't touch on anything that could be considered controversial. A lot of women here have pointed out (and I agree) that there's a survival aspect here. New mom needs a village, so she needs to avoid saying anything that could be off-putting to her potential community. But I find myself wishing I could speak more freely with other moms and share more of myself. Even when I do, I find myself mostly sharing opinions I feel they will agree with. Does anyone have any ideas for how to promote freer speech norms among mom friends?
The fact that only one of the issues directly affected women doesn't exactly jam up that argument. It would also make sense if, being historically more constrained by the consequences of political decisions, women are generally more reactive on the behalf of whatever group is most affected while men get to remain aloof and treat political discourse as a kind of game. I suspect this is at least part of a larger explanation.
This is because men are more likely to physically attack and beat up their opponents, so they know they always have the option of violence if they don’t like what they hear.
Male negative actions have been carefully regulated over time. We have rules to deal with male anger and severe consequences for violence. This is an issue that was solved generations ago. The only places it has returned are those where "activists" have successfully pushed to keep more violent men out of jail and on the street. Very few of those activists are male.
tangental but relevant. possibly sheds insight on WHY men are more tolerant.
https://alastairadversaria.com/2016/11/17/a-crisis-of-discourse-part-2-a-problem-of-gender/?fbclid=IwY2xjawN4QWdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE5RWJaeEtUMEZEdmQzTlBxc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsskqgCzCPb6LxfbqzK6XA6ZIVsqWq4z37R65nVIE4W_pVsxlLY2vobWl0VM_aem_XBWyDbsxZ148h5aG5_cyVg
Surprised? I think not
I wonder if the same tolerance applies to dating?
Yes, this is why you can’t get laid. It’s not you.